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BEYOND PLAN B

Cary CarsonVice President (retired),

Research Division, Colonial Williamsburg Foundation(7/29/09)

They say misery loves company. In that case, those of us who gather at Brown nextmonth to talk about the uncertain future of history museums might take comfort fromgetting to know James Conlon, music director of the Los Angeles Opera. Interviewed inthis months Opera News, Conlon asks

Do you know what the American paradox is?We produce the greatest quantity of high-quality orchestras in the world.

There are opera companies all over the place. The level of musicianship thatwe produce, across the board, is higher in America than anywhere else in the world.

So whats the paradox? I dont know a single institution that isnt fighting to keepits audience. Not one! And Im not talking about the last five months, since the

crash, or the years since 9/11. Im talking about the last 35 years.

He continued.

I dont have any grandiose ideas about my ability to change this.Im just one person. I do think that performing artists have only recentlyawakened to the realization that we do not exist in an ivory tower. We have to get out

there and roll up our sleeves. . . . People want contact with the stage and the personalityof the conductor. They see the back of the conductor all the time. Theyd like to see the

front of the conductor too. But what they really want is to be part of the discourse.Theres a need to find more meaning in music, to understand it on

a deeper level, to be educated about it.

Already I know from reading the postings on the workshop website that our own agendais likely to include conversations on two matters that concern Conlon as much as they domuseum historiansdwindling audiences and new ways for museum-goers to join in the

search for a meaningful past. I wrote about both in the End of History Museums essaythat Steve reprinted on the website. I need not go over that ground again here.

Instead Id like to raise a more basic issue, one that I didnt deal with in the piece forThePublic Historian. Lets imagine for the sake of argument that historians and theircollaborators did somehow manage to set Plan B (or something like it) into motion.What treatment of the past would make that tremendous effort worth the trouble? Toparaphrase Wayne Booth long ago, what historical knowledge is most worth having, inparticular right now, in the early twenty-first century? If the brain trust that Steve andKym assemble in Providence doesnt wrestlewith that one, who will? Conlons highregard for the level of musicianship today could be said to have its counterpart in

European and American history museums. Never have these institutions of informallearning employed so many professionally trained historians. But to what purpose first ofall, and then Conlons other question, to what effect?

We can all still remembereach of us somewhat differently of coursethat moment inthe intellectual life of our profession when a few noteworthy museum exhibitions andliving history programs made national headlinesEnola Gay, The West As America,and A More Perfect Union at the Smithsonian, Mining the Museum at the Maryland

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Historical Society, and the 1996 re-enacted estate sale where enslaved Africans wereauctioned on the street in Williamsburg. They all had one thing in common. Old andwidely respected cultural institutions cashed in their credibility with the general public toweigh in on public issues that burned red-hot at the center of the 1990s culture wars.

Looking back, we see that such revered and reviled presentations didnt really shape thedebates so much as they lent the weight of the sponsoring institutions reputations andauthority to a changing understanding of American history thatwas already well on theway to becoming orthodoxy. Films, television, novels, stage plays, art exhibitions, andother mass media were opening peoples eyes to a wider, more tolerant outlook onAmerican society and (less successfully) on the world at large. Museums made theirspecial contribution by giving this new awareness a historical perspective. Gettingpeople ready for change is what public intellectuals do for a living; and its what publichistorians and the intellectual organizations they work for should do too when the needarises.

Oxford historian Margaret MacMillan argues in her most recent book that in our secularage history has replaced religion as the setter of moral standards and the transmitter ofsocial values. So, as one reviewer reasoned, we now expect the judgment of historynot only to meet historians particular criteriaobjectivity and fairnessbut also to be

identity-affirming, consensus-building, nation-making, virtue-instructing, and generation-binding as well. While I welcome the fact that these are the goals that nine-out-of-tenhistory museum exhibitions set out to accomplish, I am unwilling to leave out one more.There are times when our leading history museums and historical societies need to tell thecountrys story to open peoples eyes to national problems long in the making, tochallenge traditional values that have outlived their usefulness, and generally to make thefuture less daunting by reminding museum-goers that problem-solving is an Americantradition too. Or has been. There are times when courageous institutions need to get outin front of history, which means out in front of many museum visitors, both to point theway ahead and smooth the way toward what comes next.

Surely any serious conversation about the future of history museums ought to havesomething to say about The Future. Lets promise ourselves that we will spend some ofour time at Brown identifying issues on todays national agenda that have historical andvisual dimensions that our museums can address more honestly than do manyCongressmen, talk show hosts, and a few distinguished Harvard professors. Lets leaveProvidence with a sense of what worthwhile historical knowledge museums can sharewith todays visitors who, as music director Conlon would put it, want to be part of thedialog about the future of the country.

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